Shattered Sky (56 page)

“Some things can never be justified,” Dillon told him, “but we have to do them anyway. In the past few years, I've managed to kill at least a thousand people—some of them intentionally. Does the fact that I brought back ten thousand stop me from being a mass murderer?” Dillon asked.

“Are you asking for forgiveness?”

“Not anymore. There was a time when all I wanted was to be forgiven, doing penance, longing for redemption. And then I wanted to be damned—because I was certain it was the only way to save the world. Now all I want is the one thing I can give everyone but myself.”

“And that is?”

“Completion.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Let's go to Thira, Winston. Let's kill who we have to kill, resurrect who we have to resurrect to get there, and make our stand against the vectors. And then, win or lose, we can finally rest.”

T
HEY FOUND THE OWNER
of an amphibian plane and although they had no money to speak of, they persuaded him to drop everything and fly them across the Aegean Sea. The only hazard Dillon and Winston could see was how clouded the man's eyes were with tears as he took off. It was a small plane, a four-seater. Just enough room for Dillon, Winston, the man and his wife. His wife was thoroughly confused—too confused, really, to question much of anything—and with good reason. Until about a half hour before takeoff she had been dead. Dead for about fifteen years. She still wore the dress she had been buried in; a teal gown the man had bought her for their tenth anniversary just weeks before she had died. He would have
given his plane, his house, as many pounds of flesh as Dillon would have exacted, but all Dillon wanted was a ride.

Three hours later, Thira loomed in the distance, pushing up from the horizon's edge like Atlantis rising. Its jagged, striated cliffs, tinged in maroon and violet, gave the eerie impression of the Grand Canyon submerged.
So, I'm back in the Grand Canyon
, Dillon thought. Half a world away, but he was still waging the same battle—only this time he understood what he was expected to do. Perhaps not how to do it, but that, he had to believe, would come.

The sun hung low this late afternoon, beneath troubled clouds, turning the jagged burnt purple of old lava into red flames, as if the island reflected the sulfuric fires of Hades itself.

“Beauteous, no?” asked the pilot. Perhaps under other circumstances it would have been beautiful, but not today.

As they neared the island, the air became rough, and Dillon chose not to give them a capsule of order in which to fly. Letting the slightest bit of his power escape now would signal the vectors that he was here. And besides, the roughness of the flight was a healthy dose of reality in an existence that had turned so surreal.
Let me feel the reality of this place,
he thought,
Let me feel the harshness of what happened here before, and what is yet to come. Let it stir me into action; let it harden my resolve.

The clouds directly above the island were high, and broiled with internal lightning. They bubbled and bled like a living thing, and the small amphibious plane pitched with the tempestuous wind.

Michael's wind
, thought Dillon. He was somewhere nearby; this unsettled sky was his doing, and by the look of it, Michael wasn't doing well. What did a sky like this betray of Michael's feelings? Anger? Despondence?

“Soon,” the pilot said. “Soon Thira. Down wet.”

“He means we'll land in the water,” Winston offered.

“I figured that one out, thanks.”

The woman looked at them and smiled awkwardly, like a hostess with nothing to offer her guests, while up above them, the sky boiled.

As they approached the crescent-shaped island, Dillon could see that the center of this violent sky wasn't over the island—it was a few miles beyond it, to the south.

“Tell him to take us around the island to its south side,” Dillon said. Winston translated, and the pilot turned to the right.

Beneath them now was the massive bay, almost closed into a circle by the curve of the land. Then without warning the plane took a violent, bolt-wrenching jolt. Anything loose in the cabin hit the ceiling, the woman cried out in Greek, and the plane dropped a few hundred feet before the pilot wrestled the plane under control.

“Air bad; boom boom,” the pilot said. His best translation of turbulence. But that batch of turbulence had nothing to do with air conditions. Dillon had felt it even before the plane did. He felt it
within
him, not around him.

“Winston?”

“I felt it, too.”

They will tear open an old scar
, Okoya had said. Could this have been a vein of the scar they had passed through? A malformed thread of space that wove like a snake in and around Thira?

“Tell him to take us wide around the island,” Dillon said, not wanting to experience another tendril of the ancient scar.

As they rounded the island, the ocean in the distance glowed white. At first it appeared to be a particularly violent patch of whitecaps, until they got close enough to see definition within
the many specks filling this corner of the Aegean. These weren't waves, they were boats! Thousands of them, large and small, forging a wedge across the rough sea.

Forging a vector.

Dillon's teeth clenched at the thought.

This wedge of ships seemed endless. It stretched to the horizon. The pilot looked nervously to Winston and Dillon for an explanation.

“Lourdes?” asked Winston.

Dillon nodded.

“She can't be that powerful to control so many.”

“She can, if she's in syntaxis with Michael and Tory.”

Winston shuddered. “Then she's turned them.”

“If she has, we've lost before we've started.” But he knew Michael and Tory. They'd die before they were turned. So what was going on here?

“She's forcing them. That's why the sky is so rough—that's the reason for the winds. Michael's fighting it.”

“And he's losing.”

Dillon had the pilot turn around before she pulled them from the sky.

They headed back toward the bay, the pilot panicking as he tried to land on the surging waves. And although Dillon had the power to calm and order a strip of ocean for a smooth landing, he did not. He remained contained.

The plane survived the landing, and when they had taxied close enough to the shore, Dillon opened the door and hopped out. Dropping chest deep, he waded for shore with Winston close behind. The pilot shouted to them before he closed the door and powered for takeoff.

“What did he want?” Dillon asked.

“He wanted to know why we didn't just walk on water.”

On a hill sloping up from the bay, they found a shack ineffectively guarded by two emaciated dogs that barked in perfect counterpoint. The grassy hillside around the shack was strewn with rusted objects. Bent bicycle wheels, washer tubs, a car engine on blocks—so many, in fact, that Dillon had to fight his natural urge to glint just the tiniest bit, repairing and restoring them all. The man who lived there was a tinker of sorts, salvaging parts from anything and everything, leaving the rest aesthetically abandoned in the tall grass. Winston bartered his watch for room and board for the night.

With the last rays of the settling sun, the first of Lourdes's fleet began to enter the bay. Dillon watched them from the tinker's window with uneasy vigilance. He was exhausted, and as he peered at the boats sailing into the bay, the watchful eye of the full moon gleaming off the water hypnotized him. He fell into a deep, anesthetic sleep.

T
HE
T
HIRAN GATE STOOD AT THE HEAD OF A CLIFF, AT THE
apex of the lagoon—a place where the crescent of the island stretched out on either side like a pair of arms engulfing the bay.

The gate was a simple rectangular stone arch, freestanding, thirty feet high, framing the sky. During the day, the gate stood like an empty picture frame, and at night, the gate was lit in dramatic green and red with spotlights strategically placed around the site. It was built thousands of years ago to frame the rising moon—and was originally meant to be just an entrance to a much larger structure—a temple of Apollo—but the temple itself was never built. Legend was that anyone who worked on it died of an unexplained malady; and thus the arch was believed to be cursed. Local tour guides still contended that tourists who stood beneath the arch for lengthy photo opportunities always came down with dysentery in the evening. For those who did dare to stand in the arch, even for a moment, they would never forget the eerie sensation it gave; a sense of disconnection—of muddled thought and disturbed equilibrium. Those who were particularly sensitive would even speak of a vision the place gave them; a knotty, gnarled tree with twisted branches spreading far into the sky, and roots worming deep into the earth.

As the tree image had deep significance to just about every deity that had inhabited the isle over the ages, the place had a long history of religious significance—most recently the Greek
Orthodox Church, which had added its own flourish to the sight, if only to dispel any pagan connection. The church had erected a small chapel nearby, and along the thousand steps that led from the gate down to the sea, they had constructed a dozen small shrines, each one dedicated to a different patron saint, of which there was no shortage in Greece. Religious significance had waned in recent years, except around holidays, but the tourist trade kept the offering tin full.

The novice priest who lived behind the chapel substituted for a night watchman, as it was less expensive, and frankly more effective. Local youth were far less likely to vandalize the gate with the prospect of a Man of God casting his eye, and an accusing finger, at them.

On this night, however, the gate's visitors were of a very different ilk.

At about nine in the evening, the young priest was disturbed by voices coming from the gate. When he went to investigate, he found a woman and a child exploring the structure. Tourists, no doubt. At night the splendor of the gate was to be observed from a distance, but tourists were drawn to its light like moths. He was always amazed by their audacity and tenacity, making pilgrimages to every spot in their Fodor's guide, regardless of weather or posted hours.

“We're closed until morning,” he told them. “Please come back at nine.”

The woman and the child stared at him with the blank expressions of foreigners, so he tried it again in German, and then in English. The third apparently worked.

“Please. It's late. Come back tomorrow.”

“Forgive us our trespasses,” the woman said. Then the boy smiled at him, but it didn't appear right. It wasn't the smile of youth, but of wizened, jaded age. Had he not been pondering
that grin, he might have heard someone coming up behind him, but as it was, he didn't hear a thing—only felt the palm cup around his chin from behind, and then the snap of his own neck as a strong arm wrenched his head one hundred and eighty degrees around. His dying thought as he hit the ground was that the woman had something hideously wrong about her face.

They left him lying in the dirt, not caring to bother with his disposal. Memo turned to the man who had come out of the darkness to dispatch the priest. “We were worried that you wouldn't show up,” he said, in Spanish.

“English, please,” the man said. “This host does not speak Spanish.”

Apparently his new host didn't speak English very well either, and spoke it with a strong accent that Memo did not recognize, for he too was limited by the memories and experience of his host body.

The woman stepped forward with a slinky gait. “Your new host,” she offered, “is much more attractive than the old man.”

“And yours is still as ugly.”

She whipped her hair around indignantly. Memo felt deep within his host body a pang of human sorrow at the mention of the old man.
“Abuelo,”
the child mind said.
“I have killed Abuelo.”
But he handily crushed the emotion. Such feelings were useful in manipulating Lourdes, but had no purpose now.

“I see that you failed,” Memo said to the temporal vector.

“Not entirely,” he answered. “I have now—how do you call it—an insurance policy.” He explained how his last few days had unfolded, and Memo listened, weighing what he heard, pondering all the contingencies.

“Less than we wanted,” Memo concluded, “but it will do.”
Then he looked to the gate. While his human eyes could not see the scar, his inhuman spirit could. The central vein of the scar ran directly through the gate like a jagged bolt of lightning piercing a window. Human eyes couldn't see it but they had sensed enough of it to build this frame around it. Here is where the vectors would tear open the hole to their own dying world; a hole so massive that it would allow passage of the entire complement of their species in a matter of seconds. Then, once they were through, they would inhabit the hosts that Lourdes had collected for them.

“You see,” Memo said, looking out over a bay so packed with vessels there was no room to maneuver. “Lourdes did the job.”

Then he turned to the temporal vector, noting the muscular physique of his new host-body. “Kill Michael and Tory, but first kill Lourdes,” Memo ordered. “This new host of yours is stronger than the old man, so you will not need our help.”

The temporal vector pulled the lips of his host into a sinister smile and said, “This I will enjoy.”

L
OURDES SET UP CAMP
on the shore of the bay, at one of the few places where the cliffs receded far enough to allow for a rocky beach.

The clearing she created for herself was a perfect circle, and at its edge a ring of people stood at rigid attention, shoulder to shoulder. Pressed against them from behind was another row, and another, and another; twenty concentric rings that provided Lourdes with a dense protective layer of human flesh. Things had come full circle for Lourdes—once again she was surrounded by flesh, only now the flesh was no longer beneath her skin. They stood there, her private army, jaws locked, bodies and wills under siege. She did not see or acknowledge
their faces. She didn't care. To her these were no longer people and they hadn't been for quite some time. They were cattle. Meat to herd and manipulate.